Steve Albini: Excellent Italian Interview (Boston Phoenix, 10/23/07

Steve Albini: a pretty nerdy guy

Steve Albini is a pretty nerdy guy. It didn’t take long in a conversation with him until we were talking about poker chat room culture, CuteOverload.com, and Rick Astley. The rock band that he sings and plays guitar for, Shellac, is pretty nerdy too. But like Albini himself, much of the band’s charm comes from this attitude of not really caring how nerdy they come across. This is a band, after all, that built their own amplifiers and included specs on the amps in the liner notes of their first single. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they make blistering minimal hard rock with one of rock’s greatest rhythm sections (drummer Todd Trainer, bassist Bob Weston) and one of rock’s most singularly distinctive guitarists.

Shellac’s most recent album, Excellent Italian Greyhound (Touch And Go), released earlier this year, was their first in seven years. I thought it would be really cute to interview Albini in Italy, since the album title mentions Italy, and they were playing in Italy, and coincidentally I was going to be there anyway. But like a lot of things Shellac, “Italy” is just some involved meta in-reference, so I might as well have interviewed Steve Albini on Pluto. As it was, I interviewed him in a rock club called Interzona in Verona, setting of part of Romeo and Juliet, the work that, for you internet readers, was the original inspiration for Baz Luhrmann’s classic 1994 film Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as star-crossed lovers who packed large handguns and weren’t afraid to use them on each other/themselves. Walking to the venue involved leaving behind the old world charm of the typically exquisitely Italian downtown area of Verona and entering an area haunted by the run-down relics of Italy’s Fascist public works period.

So what is this place?
It’s actually pretty famous ― during the Fascist period, Mussolini had this idea that he was going to centralize all of the distribution of produce from Italy ― that everything grown all over Italy was going to come to Verona, to a central magazina, and then from there it would be shipped out to all over Italy under state direction. And to facilitate that, he built this big magazina, and there’s a refrigerated train switch yard, and trains cars would come in full of fruits and vegetables, and they would stay refrigerated there and then they would go through the roundabout to get loaded up onto different trucks, all under refrigeration ― so it was all a big socialism of farm production. Of course it was a total disaster and never worked, and by the time everything was built and completed, the Fascists had been chased out so then there were these giant disused buildings that were eventually squatted, and over time the squat became a legitimate venue and organized with the city. The original Interzona rock club was in the big roundhouse, the frigatoria, and it was a kind of commune, left-wing thing. This building has only recently been used as a venue, and this is the new Interzona, but it’s the same compound as the old Interzona, and gradually they are renovating it to become an arts complex.

Yeah, for some reason I thought that this show was going to be you guys in some cheesy Eurodance club or something.
This venue has actually been around for a long time, and every band I’ve ever been in has played here ― Rapeman has played here, Shellac has played here, Big Black played here a few times.

When Shellac began, it had kind of a Canadian theme, which, I dunno, was maybe an elaborate ruse?
Well, it’s kind of a temporary ― like, we get stuck in a loop, and we were stuck in a Canadian loop for a while

Right, Canada, baseball, etc. When did the Italian thing come about?
I’ll tell you what happened: I started communicating with the band Silkworm exclusively in Fake Italian. They sort of started Fake Italian. Fake Italian is speaking English with an Italian syntax and vocabulary, like using unnecessarily florid vocabulary, like [gestures to Shellac bassist Bob Weston and then speaks in fake Italian accent] “Tonight, the hair of Bob, she is like some kind of beautiful octopus, or many squids, and they are all simultaneously they are fighting and they are dancing on the Bob, and it makes from Bob a super-organism these squids fighting and dancing and the Bob.” Which is a way of saying “Bob needs a haircut.”

The nice thing about Fake Italian is that it allows you to say things that you would get punched for saying normally. It’s sort of like, we had a thing about ventriloquists for a while [as featured in the Shellac song “Mouthpiece” from 1997’s Terraform], that ventriloquists are actually just assholes that get away with it because they talk with their hands. And why does anybody actually pay money to go through that experience? It’s so retarded. If he didn’t use a funny voice and use a puppet, you’d deck him.

Right, because some people/most people are into abuse if the right distance is there.
Well, yeah, if it’s somebody harmless enough like Andrew Dice Clay, well then it’s charming. It seems like it would take a special kind of an asshole to try to get away with ventriloquism though. It would have to be a goal of yours to be insulting all the time and also not have to take responsibility for it. So you’d have to be not just a dick, but also a weasel.

Well, if you look at depictions of ventriloquists in popular culture, movies and television, etc., they’re usually creeps, and dramatically it never ends well for them.
Right. Well, that’s just an example of one of the little minor obsessions that the band fell into at some point.

So how did the Fake Italian obsession get going?
Well, it was Fake Italian for me, and then Todd bought this dog, this Italian greyhound, Uffizi ― awesome dog. And he started talking to the dog in sort of Fake Italian, but it was sort of a pet language, it wasn’t really normal Fake Italian, if I can claim authority on what is or isn’t normal Fake Italian. And he would praise Uffizi, he’d say [in fake Italian accent] “Excellent Italian Greyhound”. And then that phrase became kind of a shorthand for anything we wanted to compliment or demonstrate approval of ― “Excellent Italian Greyhound.” Like, you know, “that was a nice meal ― Excellent Italian Greyhound.” And like I said, we just get stuck in these loops.

So would you say that a lot of your lyrical preoccupations are almost in-jokes?
Oh, 100-percent. It’s not that they’re almost in-jokes, it’s that they are in-jokes. And I like to think that there is something beyond just the fact that it’s an in-joke. It’s not like The Spaghetti Incident [as in Guns N’ Roses’ quizzically titled 1994 all-covers album of the same name], you know, something of no value, you know?

So in the sense that your in-jokes are solvable rather than completely inscrutable?
Yeah, but not just that they’re solvable, but that the little turns of phrase of the perspectives have some utility outside the band, you know? Like, there’s a picture of Uffizi, the greyhound, on the cover of out new record. And there’s another illustration that [illustrious illustrator/show flyer maven] Jay Ryan did, which is this army of Italian greyhounds sort of bounding over the hills, and then inside the gatefold there’s another illustration, a sort of decampment of Italian greyhounds, sort of “at ease.” And the dogs, they all look awesome, they’re really cool looking dogs, and I kind of feel like if you can foster an appreciation of these dogs somehow, that’s useful. Like, reading the expressive quality of a dog’s face you’re encouraged to see it as a person’s face. It’s sort of like those things you see on the internet all the time, where there’s the owl saying “O RLY?”

Right, the cats with Hitler moustaches.
Right! Those things, I think, are just fantastic. I think they’re great. They’re incredible. Like that siteCuteOverload.com, it’s all just little fuzzy ducklings, and bunny rabbits, and kittens. Just recently there was this video put on there where there’s this really fat cat laying on a sofa, and bunny rabbits are crawling over him and he’s licking them on the head, and like being mother hen to all of these bunny rabbits. And you really can’t tell if he’s cleaning them or tasting them, you know? So there’s actually kind of this sinister edge to almost everyone one of these things. And the way that these cute pictures are almost always used in internet conversations as kind of putdowns or insults. But totally adorable.

So I like sort of creating articles of language. Like there’s a brand new one that I’m really fond of. I don’t know if it started there, but I discovered it on this poker forum that I’m a member of. Really super analytical poker geeks arguing with technical details of poker playing. There’s a thing called a “Rick Roll” now, where if someone posts a link to something that appears to be part of a discussion, some aspect of the conversation that’s underway, right ― but that link is actually a link to a Youtube video link of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And that’s a “Rick Roll.” If you click on a link that’s going to take you a spreadsheet page or a relevant article or something poker-related, instead you’re actually directed to this hideous video of Rick Astley, dancing in his ultra-dorky way, singing this song. It’s like someone throwing a stink bomb in the middle of a conversation, and it went from happening once to happening over and over again, and if you look up “Rick Roll” in Wikipedia, it sends you to the Rick Astley video. And if you look it up, there’s a definition of “Rick Roll” on the Urban Dictionary site. And this whole thing appears to have happened in the last week. I think that’s awesome, really fantastic. And if we can make some contribution to the cornucopia of gentle insults and accolades that circulate around the world, we’d like to.

And it’s interesting that you say that, because a lot of your stuff in Shellac is sort of jokey, right? But then what’s weird is that you guys also have a side that’s really emotionally heavy and dark and almost overwhelmingly serious. Like the song “End Of Radio” from the new album ― there are funny moments, but then there’s kind of this Armageddon thing going on.
The song’s a bummer.

What’s the origin of that song, if you don’t mind giving it away?
No, I don’t mind. That song came from a sort of ― not actual science fiction, but our conversations about what science fiction’s probably like, since none of us read science fiction.

Right. [Quietly insulted].
So the idea was that you’re the last guy on earth, and you’ve always wanted to be a radio broadcaster, and now you can be, but it’s really kind of pointless because you’re broadcasting to no one. And it’s a kind of extended metaphor about getting what you’ve always wanted, but under circumstances that make it unenjoyable.

So it’s like a Twilight Zone episode [a very specific one actually]?
Sure! But then, at the moment, there’s also a re-jiggering of the power structure of broadcast, such that actual radio is less important than all of these other media outlets that indicate the behavior of radio. And in a very real way, the way that radio was the first boom market like the way radio stocks went through the roof the same way that internet stocks went through the roof. And the way radio sort of became the cutting edge of technology, the best and brightest were all put to work on solving radio problems. Radio is now a completely orphaned medium, nobody gives a shit about it. And it has this sort of parochial limitation on it, by the natural limitation of broadcasting of radio.

I mean, there are people who are legitimately celebrities, like everyone knows their name and follows their every utterance ― in a sphere of about 400 people in a small town. Or there are people who are local celebrities who literally can’t leave their house without being recognized. Like this guy in Chicago, Steve Dahl, for example, in the ’70s ― he was not just a household word, he commanded a sort of army, a legion of fans. His most famous stunt was that he hosted a day for his followers to burn disco records at Comiskey Park. He was responsible for the Disco Demolition.

And there’s something about the notion of celebrity that is extraordinarily saturated but in a very small market. And then you’ll notice that people that start out as radio personalities that become national celebrities, they become crackpot freaks, people like Howard Stern, Don Imus, Larry King, or what’s his name, Rush Limbaugh ― like, they can handle being a superstar to 10,000 people. And that’s good for them. But when they branch out into being a sort of a cultural icon, they can’t carry that much weight and they crack and they turn into freaks and weirdos.

I guess it’s an odd transition to being all about your hometown to attempting to be “king of all media” and losing the local identity that was what you were all about.
Right and no one has ever done it, other than Ronald Reagan. No one has ever gone from being a radio announcer to being someone of actual significance. It’s never happened otherwise. And the thing is that radio simultaneously sounds super high-technology, super-exciting in a kind of technical way, and you know, it’s the beginning of the modern era, the beginning of long distance mass communication ― or I should say instant mass communication, not long distance? But now it’s like this relic.

Well yeah, it’s like there was radio but then there was television, and then radio persevered as the stepchild of TV.
No, I think radio and television co-existed quite comfortably for a long time, the same way that television and film co-existed. I think that they were different enough that there were still radio networks and television networks. Now, it seems like there are so many different ways for people to amuse themselves that radio is such a small part of that spectrum, that the only significant money to be made is by corralling all these little tiny $100,000-a-year profit making stations into these big conglomerations.

I guess if you mull the idea of radio in your mind, it has many little chicked-off facets of interest on it as a concept, but we may be coming to the end of its use, in that fashion, because a lot of those things are going to historical elements rather than contemporary elements. One of the strongest memories that I have as a child is driving around in my grandfather’s truck in his olive orchard listening to Vin Scully broadcasting Dodgers games. The sound of Vin Scully’s voice relaying baseball in this setting that sort of fixes it in my memory ― for the rest of my life, Vin Scully will be the voice of baseball, I will never be able to hear his voice without being brought into this frame of mind where I want to know what’s happening with the Dodgers. And I haven’t given a shit about the Dodgers in what, 40 years, something like that?

Yeah, I used to listen to baseball on headphones in the dark as a kid, and it’s funny because if you think about “the sound of baseball,” it’s like a tree falling in the woods, right?
Right! There’s the quiet murmur of the crowd, and Vin Scully talking about it, that’s what it all boils down to. And then he was doing the game of the week, and even when I wasn’t around my grandfather, in the ’70s, when I was kind of following the Reds and the Pirates, then Vin Scully was announcing those games every now and again, and I still hear Vin Scully in my head when I think about baseball.

One of the songs on our new album, “Genuine Lullabelle,” has a long talking part in the middle. There’s like the music part at the beginning, talking part, quiet part, and then another music part, and in between the music part and the quiet part is this talking part, and in the talking part we have interwoven, with me doing a sort of character study, there are other people’s voices making commentary on it, and those other people’s voices are all voices that we have very strong memory associations with.

We wanted to get Vin Scully, and his son, acting as his manager, told us to fuck off. But Vin Scully would have been a real coup. Studs Terkel sort of agreed to do it, but then he went into the hospital. He broke his back, and he didn’t feel up to it. Then we got other people we liked, whose voices trigger memories.

It’s interesting that at every show you guys do, and on every album, you have at least one song like “Genuine Lullabelle” that’s really an emotionally heavy downer where the rock action subsides and you kind of take the music somewhere else for a while. Even on songs that aren’t that much of a meandering bummer on album.
I know what you’re talking about, and I kind of feel like we have that option available on quite a few of our songs. We can throw a bummer in, especially live, almost anywhere. Part of that is that just in the conceptual framework of the band, we think that all of that stuff is fair game. We think that we can bum ourselves out, we think we can be jubilant, we think we can be triumphant, we can be slapstick, all of that stuff is fair game, and it doesn’t really feel complete, as an evening, unless we’ve at least taken a stab at most of them. Sometimes you can tell you’re going to get nowhere with the bummer, or the comedy or whatever.

Are you trying to get somewhere though, with the audience?
Oh no, no, no, not necessarily with the audience, but with respect with the way that we’re playing, the three of us. Like sometimes we’re just not in the mood to do everything, so we just want to blast, song song song, explosion, and then done. And then sometimes we just feel like we can play all night, and we’re not at all interested in getting through it quickly, basically we want to relish it, so we end up stretching parts out, even the bummer parts.

You guys played a show on 9/11/01, right?
We did. Super bummer.

I imagine. What was the setting of that?
It was scheduled to be the last show of a European tour. We started in Italy with Uzeda, and then we made our way north, finishing in Berlin. And we were in the hotel in Berlin and we all watched the towers collapse live on television. And we were all so bummed out, and whether we played or not seemed a trivial matter, and we realized that we weren’t going to feel better if we didn’t play. The next day is when it sunk in. There was a moment of silence, a public reverence for everyone that got killed. I didn’t know it was happening, but I walked into the big train station as this moment of silence was beginning, and I saw the whole train station, hundreds of hundreds of people, everybody standing there with their heads bowed absolutely silent, and it was one of the most affecting things I’ve ever witnessed. Those people don’t know us, they don’t anyone who was directly affected by it, it was a genuine display of sympathy for a huge calamity.

We ended up being stranded there for almost two weeks, and we got into a kind of routine: we’d get up, go to the train station, get the English language newspapers, read everything, watch CNN, bum out, and go to the Internet cafe and send emails to our girlfriends, and that was basically life for the next 10 to 12 days. And every single person we encountered there was enormously sympathetic, and the feeling of comradeship with those people was so genuine. I think that’s why I was so furious that that goodwill was so squandered. Not that it’s, generally, a bad idea to create enemies out of your friends ― I mean, those people were 100-percent on our side, and our callous and ignorant president managed to turn them against us, managed to take their enormous compassionate empathetic generous nature and nullify it, somehow.

And so quickly too.
That’s the biggest tragedy, yes. Starting a war is terrible, yes. All these people dying is terrible ― but to take what was an opportunity to create a consensus and a framework for cooperation with the whole world, and squander it, just “Fuck ’em.”

Interesting you say that, since there’s pretty much a whole wing of science fiction that deals with the “mad mastermind orchestrating a tragedy to unite the world” gambit.
[laughter]

You mentioned earlier how Shellac as a band has this arsenal of tricks, things that you can do. When you’re working on stuff, how much of these elements are played out intentionally?
An awful lot of it is . . . unfocused. Some stuff develops of its own accord. There’s one thing that happened super accidentally that I’m really fond of. There’s a song we do called “Ghosts,” and there’s sort of an introduction, and the introduction has a break, a moment where we hold the chord for a while, and then go back to the introduction. Out of nowhere, at one show, we just sort of all simultaneously went into slow motion during that suspended chord, and I have no idea why that started ― but it’s now something that we do every time. Like “Oh yeah, we have a slow motion part of the song.” When did that happen? We never talked about it or anything.

So there was no rehearsal, with “Oh hey guys, I’ve got this weird idea for a choreography move?”
Oh no, not at all. It was just like dahdahdahdahdah booooooooooooonnnnngggg, like “Oh, that sounds good, let it go for a while.” And as a result, we realized that we’re all moving in slow motion, and it turned into this thing where we have several extra-musical parts, that aren’t necessarily part of the tune or whatever, but they’re definitely part of the song.

There’s that, there’s a song where we fuck up the beginning a bunch [Greyhound’s “Be Prepared”], and the fucking up the beginning now is a part of the song where we fuck up the beginning, and it’s almost like a game to see who can come up with the best way to fuck up the beginning.

Well, you guys have been a band for 15 years now, so you can work on that level. And since you’re not exactly prolific ―
Yeah, no, not at all.

― And you guys don’t really rehearse a lot, tour a lot, or see each other in a musical context that much, compared to most “real” bands.
Right. It’s unusual for us to get together more than, say, not counting when we get together to rehearse and play a show or tour, for normal rehearsal weekends, 4 times a year, something like that.

When you started the band, was that the plan?
There was no plan, but it has worked out that way. Our lives are kind of demanding, and as our lives get more complex and demanding, the band stuff gets kind of pushed to the margins.

But you still do it.
Oh yeah, it’s still really important to us!  I know that I think about the band ― some part of every single day I spend thinking about stuff I want to do with the band, turning over in the back of my head pretty much all day every day, there’s something to do with the band.

And it’s the same with the other guys?
Probably. And a lot of what we do, aspects of an individual show, an awful lot of that is kind of that we’ve all been thinking about things that we wanted to do in the background next time we’re able to play, and now we have a chance to do it, so let’s do it.

I mentioned before how you can have a little notion that will grab your attention and you’re stuck in a loop and you won’t be able to get out of it. Lately, there’s a thing about monkeys that we just can’t get rid of. Especially the social organization of groups of monkeys. I don’t know why. I’m kind of hung up on it right now. Especially when you see where there’s one tree that’s got a bunch of monkeys in it, and another tree that’s got another bunch of monkeys in it, and they’re like four yards apart ― bitter, sworn enemies ― until a victim monkey shows up, and then they band together, chase that monkey up a tree, tear it apart, eat it, and then they go back to being bitter enemies again. But of course, the females of the bitter enemy tribes still have little liaisons with their neighbor enemy monkey tribes.

So it’s like a monkey version of Temptation Island.
Right.

So do you think that this is the way things will continue for Shellac? Not the monkeys tearing each other apart but the sporadic rehearsing/touring thing?
Seems like it, yeah. It seems like we’ve kind of established a pattern for the band. Definitely. It doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a break in the action for any of us in our normal lives, so…

It’s interesting because from an outside-the-band perspective, if you look at the Shellac discography, there seems to be a gradual deconstruction from the taut nature of the early singles through to the kind of widening looseness of the last several records, and this looseness carries into the live show as well.
Well, we like playing our old songs, but we don’t feel like we have to play them in a reverent fashion. We feel like, you know, they’re ours, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. And there are ways that we can play them now that didn’t occur to us originally. And there are things that we can do as part of a set of music with a bigger vocabulary of songs, a bigger bunch of ideas attached to them. So we can keep ourselves interested in them. I see a lot of bands where it seems that once they’ve established a method for how a song goes, every time they go out on stage and that song comes up the same way every time. It’s almost like everything about that song is over with except the number of times you hear it.

So this is why bands hate their hits?
Yeah, I guess.

I mean, you’re a big Cheap Trick fan ― are they an example of that? Like Rick Neilson with the five-neck guitar during “Surrender?”
I would, except that every single time I’ve seen them, I’ve been surprised at how awesome their songs are. It must be somnambulistic for them by now, you know? But it still delivers. But you compare that with your average not-awesome band that just has a much shorter menu to draw from, for example, and I’d blow my brains out if I had to, you know, walk out on stage and play the same 15 songs every night for three weeks, you know? I’d hang myself.

There’s a band I did a record with called Bush, and their first record gradually became super-duper popular over the course of about a year and a half-two years, and by the end of their third lap or fourth lap around the United States, they had been constantly on the road, playing the same 15 songs every night for a year and a half. I don’t know how they fucking did it without gargling acid. Seriously, I don’t know how you could do it. There’s a situation, like, they’re a band where the people that came to see them play want to hear that music exactly the way they heard it on the radio, you know? Their audience had kind of a superficial appreciation of that band, so it’s not like they wanted to go and see like a mind-blowing experience, they just wanted to be reminded what it was they liked about the songs they heard on the radio. But they were pretty hemmed in, they were pretty bound by their popularity at that point. I don’t know, I couldn’t handle it. There’s no way I could handle it. I have an enormous amount of respect for them for getting through that and not killing each other or themselves.

I always picture someone at a show like that thinking “What am I doing here, what did I come here for, why did I need to see this live?”
Everyone has a different place for music in their life. Some people have a kitchen radio, and that music is playing while they’re going on with their lives and that’s enough. And every now and again they’ll be a song that they especially like ― Rick Astley, “Never Gonna Give You Up”, for example ― and eventually those people are going to want to buy a record, and what record are they going to buy? “Oh, I really like that Rick Astley song, I think I’ll buy that.” And then once a year they’ll go out to a concert, and they’ll be like “Oh, that Rick Astley that I love so much is coming, let’s go to that.” And you know, the place of music in their lives is different than the place of music in my life. So I cannot expect them to have the same relationship to the aesthetics of it that I do, or even making the same demands on it that I do.

Do you think that the demands you make on music are sane?
I know exactly what you’re saying ―

Sometimes I look at people with a more casual relationship to music and go “Why can’t I be more like that?”
Exactly. “Why does it matter to me?” Because it bums me out so much. Yeah, yeah, like I remember that ZZ Top album with the drum machine on it, and I was like “Why are you breaking my heart right now?” “Why is it not okay for me to just not give a shit about this right now?”